The Barnes Foundation Loosens Its Straitjacket
A judge allowed the Philadelphia institution to lend paintings from the storied collection of Dr. Albert C. Barnes. It will look and behave a lot more like a global museum.
If a visitor goes to the Barnes Foundation, and a favorite Cézanne, Matisse or Renoir is missing because it is on loan to the Louvre, is the Barnes still the Barnes?
Art Review
A Museum, Reborn, Remains True to Its Old Self, Only Better
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
The new Barnes Foundation, in a new shell in Philadelphia. More Photos »
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: May 17, 2012
PHILADELPHIA — The Barnes Foundation’s move from suburban Philadelphia to the center of the city caused art lovers lots of worry.
Multimedia
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
The west wall of the main room of the new Barnes
Foundation in Philadelphia, with Seurat’s “Models” over Cézanne’s “Card
Players.” More Photos »
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Matisse’s Fauve masterpiece “Joie de Vivre,” in a new spot. More Photos »
Devotees of this great polyglot collection, heavy with Renoir, Cézanne
and Matisse, which the omnivore art shopper Albert C. Barnes amassed
between 1912 and his death in 1951, were appalled by the idea. Barnes
spent years obsessively arranging his installation
cheek-by-jowl in the mansion in Lower Merion, Pa., that he built for
the purpose and opened in 1925, and he stipulated that, after he died,
it should remain exactly as it was.
In 2002 the foundation’s board — constrained by limits on attendance and
public hours imposed by zoning restrictions — announced plans to
relocate. Many people, including a group that sued to stop the move,
were sure that it could only desecrate this singular institution.
Others, myself included, did not object to the move per se, but felt
that faithfully reproducing the old Barnes in the new space, as promised
by the trustees, was a terrible idea. To us it seemed time to at least
loosen up Barnes’s straitjacketed displays, wonderful as they often
were. And why go to the trouble of moving the collection to a more
accessible location when the galleries were not going to be any bigger?
And yet the new Barnes proves all of us wrong. Against all odds, the
museum that opens to the public on Saturday is still very much the old
Barnes, only better.
It is easier to get to, more comfortable and user-friendly, and, above
all, blessed with state-of-the-art lighting that makes the collection
much, much easier to see. And Barnes’s exuberant vision of art as a
relatively egalitarian aggregate of the fine, the decorative and the
functional comes across more clearly, justifying its perpetuation with a
new force.
As a result, his quirky institution is suddenly on the verge of becoming
the prominent and influential national treasure that it has long
deserved to be. It is also positioned to make an important contribution
to the way we look at and think about art.
Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects,
who pulled off this feat — and somehow managed to avoid the feeling of
plastic fakeness that Barnes purists and Barnes skeptics alike were
anticipating — deserves our gratitude. The Merion building and its 24
galleries, and Barnes’s arrangements within them, have been recreated
with amazing fidelity in terms of proportions, window placement and
finishings, albeit in a slightly more modern style. The structure is
oriented to the south, exactly as in Merion; the same mustard-colored
burlap covers the walls; the same plain wood molding outlines doors and
baseboards.
As for Barnes’s arrangements, almost nothing is out of place: not one of
the hundreds of great French paintings, none of the pieces of
Americana, nor any of the Greek or African sculptures, the small New
Mexican wood-panel santos or the scores of wrought-iron hinges, locks,
door handles and whatnot that dot the interstices like unusually
tangible bits of wallpaper pattern, often subtly reiterating the
compositions of the paintings.
The only change to the installation — a big improvement — is the removal
of the colorful fantasy of nudes in a landscape that is Matisse’s great
Fauve masterpiece, “Joie de Vivre,” from its humiliating position on
the stairway landing to a large alcove on the balcony overlooking the
main gallery.
At the same time, some major systemic improvements make everything
breathe in a new way. Especially important is the lighting system,
designed by Paul Marantz, which seamlessly mixes natural and artificial
illumination into a diffuse, even light, and had early visitors asking
if some of the paintings had been cleaned. (They hadn’t.) There is also
the spatial largess: The recreated building is set within a larger
structure that includes a raft of amenities, among them a cafe, an
auditorium and a gracious garden court with lots of padded benches, as
well as a 5,000-square-foot temporary exhibition gallery that pulses
with curatorial possibility.
Barnes’s arrangements are as eye-opening, intoxicating and, at times,
maddening as ever, maybe more so. They mix major and minor in
relentlessly symmetrical patchworks that argue at once for the idea of
artistic genius and the pervasiveness of talent. Nearly every room is an
exhibition unto itself — a kind of art wunderkammer, or cabinet of
curiosities — where you can spend hours parsing the echoes and
divergences among the works in terms of color, composition, theme,
surface and light.
In Room 4, two Chardins flank a (school of) El Greco beneath
16th-century carved-wood reliefs from France; almost all depict women
engaged in various tasks. In Room 14, painted Chinese fans hover beside
Matisse’s magnificent 1907 portrait of his wife in a red madras
headdress, with a folkish Surrealist painting by Jean Hugo,
great-grandson of Victor, positioned above. Several American Modernists
make recurring appearances, including Charles Demuth, Maurice
Prendergast and William Glackens, a former high school classmate of
Barnes’s who turned him on to Modern art; so, to lesser extent, do
artists who taught at the Barnes. In front of several Renoirs are
wonderful pots by that painter’s son, the future filmmaker Jean.
The twin poles of Barnes’s world are Renoir, represented by 181 works
(the largest concentration in the world), and Cézanne, represented by
69. Barnes never seemed to tire of playing these two giants off each
other, alternating the fuzzy, sybaritic pinks of Renoir’s forms —
whether female or floral — with Cézanne’s anxious, angular blues, greens
and rusts, played out in landscapes, still lifes and numerous paintings
of bathers, early and late, small and large.
Their back-and-forth dominates several galleries, and the Renoirs are so
ubiquitous that at times they seem to become a kind of background
noise. That is, until you come up against a great one, like “Leaving the
Conservatory,” an imposing full-length grouping of several Parisians
dressed in shades of gray that hangs above a predominantly gray-blue
Pennsylvania Dutch blanket chest. These wonderful chests, of which there
are several outstanding examples, as well as the numerous ceramics,
affirm Barnes’s appreciation of painting as a free-range language
expressed in various materials, not only oil on canvas.
There are also seemingly endless surprises, like the lone work by the
postwar Italian artist Afro in Room 10, which also contains a veritable
Matisse retrospective, including a small, early still life that you
could swear is a Manet, and numerous works by Picasso and Modigliani.
And there are oddities everywhere that might not pass muster in a more
conventional museum, like a European, possibly 15th-century, panel in
Room 23, depicting a Flight Into Egypt. The colors are rich, the figures
big and wonderfully drawn, but the real life of the picture emanates
from the greenery, applied in loose splotches that bring to mind the
brushy, sponged-on glazes of American redware ceramics. Looking at the
slightly bizarre bits of green, you have no idea if they were part of
the original picture or added later, but you don’t care, and perhaps
Barnes did not, either. It made a point about continuities of human
touch and technique, and he went for it.
In many ways the rebirth of the Barnes could not be better timed. It
occurs at a point of intense public interest in art — witness the fact
that since the project’s groundbreaking in November 2009, membership has
jumped from 400 to nearly 20,000 — and it approaches art with an
unfettered directness that is becoming rare among major American
museums, of which the Barnes is now one.
At a moment when so many museums seem bent on turning themselves into
entertainment and social centers, or frequently mount dry, overly
academic exhibitions, the Barnes irrefutably foregrounds art and
nonverbal visual experience. The galleries are devoid of text panels and
even wall labels; most works have the artist’s last name or some other
cultural identification nailed to their frames, and there are printed
guides stored in benches in each gallery that identify the works on
view.
Audio guides will be available, but really, there is nothing to do here
but look at art and think for yourself. The dense clusters and
juxtapositions provide more than enough to work with: a visual deluge of
forms — in different mediums and materials, from widely spread times
and places — that make looking and thinking reflexive, rapturous and
liberating.
At the same time, the relocation of the Barnes, with all its mixings and
juxtapositions, comes at a time when curators of all kinds — from
museum professionals to artists organizing gallery group shows — are
increasingly interested in cross-cultural, cross-medium presentations of
artworks. In this regard the Barnes looks utterly prescient.
And let’s not overlook the implications of that temporary gallery, which
is opening with an exhibition about Barnes’s life and the history of
the foundation. This space creates the possibility of a new flexibility
with regard to the meticulous re-creation of the Merion galleries. They
suggest that the Barnes may be able to have its cake and eat it too,
hold on to its past and also forge a new future.
Barnes purists may consider this heresy, but Barnes’s installation
should sometimes change and move a little. There are moments, especially
in the upstairs galleries among the plethora of drawings and Greek and
African objects, where the presentation palls and oppresses a bit, even
now. The symmetrical patchwork doesn’t always come across as
meticulously assembled; it can seem arbitrary and maniacally crowded.
More generally, there is simply too much there for everything to remain
in perpetual lockdown.
The Barnes curators need to come up with creative ways — say for two or
three months, every other year — to extract certain works from the
gallery collection, walk them across the garden court and put them on
view in the temporary-exhibition galleries for less encumbered viewing.
Set out all the African works, for example. Give us a Cézanne or a
Matisse retrospective. Or a survey of the Pennsylvania Dutch blanket
chests and related Americana whose hues and surfaces Barnes was so alive
to.
Barnes did so much, more than he was capable of knowing. We can know how
much only if his orchestrations are taken apart and rearranged ever so
slightly and briefly, once in a while. It is great that Tod Williams and
Billie Tsien, the architects, adhered to his vision so sensitively,
providing a kind of unwaveringly accurate baseline. But every so often
the pieces of even his most revelatory ensembles should be freed from
his matrix, just as his amazing achievement has been liberated from
Merion.
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